ARGENTINA-POLITICS: Irregularities Reported In Voters’ Lists

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 26 1997 (IPS) - With just two months to go before legislative elections in Argentina, an independent study has revealed irregularities in at least 17 percent of voter registration lists.

The author of the study, Ariel Garbarz, told IPS that, once finalized, the review of the complete lists will be presented to state prosecutors. The opposition Radical Civic Union (UCR) will also submit its study.

Garbarz declared the cause of irregularities could be traced to the National Electoral College, the Ministry of the Interior, or the National Registry. “We can say with certainty that all three of these bodies are guilty of negligence,” he said.

Garbarz is a professor in the department of Computer Engineering at the University of Buenos Aires and is in charge of the Program of Technical Assistance to public administration agencies. His consulting company first discovered the irregularities in the lists.

Out of 14 million eligible voters, more than 2.5 million were found to carry the same name and identification number or a number off by one digit. A review of the complete voting list of 22 million names still has to be completed.

The Ministry of the Interior had handed over a “DAT” tape with the first part of the voting list to the UCR, which Garbarz organized and printed out by computer, putting first all those with repetitions. That was when the irregularities showed up.

The secretary of Institutional Affairs at the Ministry, Liliana Gurdulich, admitted that there could be some errors but insisted they would be less than “even 0.5 per cent” of the total list. Nevertheless, in the face of Garbarz’s findings, said if the figures were verified, “we’ll have to go through them all.”

Garbarz warned that “the conditions for fraud are here” for the elections, sheduled for October 26 elections if nothing is done in response to the study.

With less publicity, the Compunor research firm, contracted by a sector of the governing Justicialist Party in the major province of Buenos Aires arrived at the same conclusions with respect to the percentage of similar voter entries.

Garbarz maintained that the same questionable voting lists, with the inclusion of minors and address changes, was used in 1995 when the president Carlos Menem was re-elected by almost 50 per cent of the vote.

The primaries in October are regarded as key to Argentine’s political future since the two major opposition parties, the Radical Civic Union and the National Solidarity Front formed an alliance to defeat the Justicialista Party, which has won all the national elections since 1987.

Garbarz was also contracted by the UCR in the Northeast province of Misiones, where a fierce contest for the October primaries is expected. There, he found cases there of duplicate documents – with a single digit changed – which may result in the elimination of these voters from the rolls.

“These cases were cross-checked with the list of those affiliated with UCR and we saw that most of the voters were members of that party,” observed Garbarz, explaining that the operation was achieved by a simple computer program.

At the same time, a large number of cases of similar documents was found in Misiones, and, again, upon comparing them to the lists of members of the Justicialista Party the same pattern was found, meaning that members of that party were able to go twice to the voting booths.

Garbarz considers this a result, not from mistakes or accidents, but from a “deliberate statistical manoeuver,” although he avoided pinpointing who might be responsible. He said he preferred compiling the data to present to the courts in an independent report, separate from that of the party who originally hired him.